LG/WWW

Back in 2013 I wrote about about kick starting collaboration and in the spirit of LocalGov Digital 's ethos of "Think. Do. Share" we've been thinking, then doing something about it. A couple of weeks ago LocalGovDigital Makers launched Pipeline , to help enable collaboration between council digital teams. At present it's very much an alpha, a platform to investigate the functionality needed to allow councils to work together more closely together and a pilot to test out Makers Project Teams . We publicised the launch with a few tweets, an article on the LocalGov Digital website and Digital  by Default News ran a piece on it you could say it was fairly low key. As I write this, we've had people from 50 different councils sign up. I'm under no illusion. This isn't 50 councils all ready to dive head-first into the sharing and collaboration of their digital work, I'm sure some will have joined through personal interest or curiosity. I do...

Yesterday was the first LocalGov Digital Makers (LGMakers) meet, in Guildford. It was an event that Ben Cheetham , Dan Blundell and I organised to show some of the Makers Project Team pilot projects but more importantly hear people's views on collaborative working and get them involved in LGMakers. The event was only open to those working in local government  ( I wrote why here ) and around 40 people from 25 councils attended. For me the event confirmed there's a growing desire amongst those working for local governments to do things differently. This is heartening, as given the diminishing funds councils have at their disposal, increasingly local authorities have to stop doing things or find alternative ways of doing them. With Makers Project Teams, by using existing tools such as GitHub , Trello , Slack , Twitter and creating a few more (they'll be more about the pilot projects in the next couple of weeks) council digital teams would share their work, where comm...

LocaGov Digital Makers (Makers) is the network for designers and developers from LocalGov Digital . Makers is open to all, and attendees at our Hack Day in June included people from local governments, the Ordnance Survey, the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Government Digital Service, the NHS and the private sector. So why is the Makers Meet-Up on 11 September just open to those working for a council? Change is generally enacted by those with a mandate or by consensus when a critical mass start doing something new. Makers don't have a mandate, and whilst we're much more that just a group of volunteers, we're only working in tens of councils rather than hundreds. On Thursday we've got people from over 25 councils coming to talk about how they can start changing things and working together, whilst still retaining the autonomy the need to meet local users' needs. We've got LocalGovCamp veterans coming, we've got others taking ...

Last year I helped put together the LocalGov Digital Content Standards . They're a guide to writing content for local government websites, drawing from and adding to best practice that already exists. I also managed a project to create a local government site written to the standards. It made me think about written language in a new way, though Twitter and its 140 character limit had already done this to some extent. There's a great quote from Mark Twain: I didn't have time to write you a short letter so I wrote you a long one. It's harder to put your point across succinctly without losing the meaning, than it is to waffle on using superfluous and convoluted phraseology over and over again, much the same as I've just done. Along the same lines, I love this video from GDS, "It’s not dumbing down, it’s opening up": Enough said. So what's this got to do with digital transformation? In the past few weeks there's been some discussion abou...

Last week LocalGov Digital Makers published information about the creation of Makers Project Teams . Unlike top-down initiatives such as Individual Voter Registration (IER), Makers Project Teams is very much a bottom-up collaboration, largely created by local government digital practitioners. Makers Project Teams will commence with two pilots and they'll form part of the discussion at the Makers Meet-Up on 11th September . There's still a few places available, so if you work for a council and are interested in joining the discussion please get in touch with @LGMakers or leave a comment on my blog. The pilots will not only create outputs to improve cross-council collaboration, they'll allow those who take part to assess and improve how project teams work. Think of it as an alpha version of a project team creating a beta product. Given my involvement, naturally I'm a big supporter of this initiative however I do have one word of warning. Makers Project Teams ne...

Yesterday I joined in a discussion on Twitter about "what is digital" and then read the piece that provoked it. Usually you'd do this the other way round, but conversations online don't always follow a linear pattern. That's my excuse anyway and I'm sticking to it. The piece was called Defining Digital by Matt Jukes . It's an excellent summary of the problems one faces when trying to define what "digital" actually means. It got me thinking about how I define it and I was with Matt all the way to his statement: Digital is a belief in the ability of the internet to transform…whether that be society, businesses, education, government or whatever…and the understanding of how that might be achieved. For me, digital doesn't mean online or relating to the internet. If you're using digital to mean online, just say online. Matt's research shows that it's a far more prevalent term which means users stand a greater chance of un...

Register to vote is a new digital service created by the Government Digital Service and is available on GOV.UK. All you need is your National Insurance Number and it takes about 5 minutes to start the voter registration process. Satisfaction with GOV.UK users is high, around 95%, and I can say from experience that I found it quick and easy to use, myself. There are problems with the process once you leave GOV.UK however, in fact the first warning signs are as you finish the GOV.UK part of the process. "contact your local electoral registration office" says the completion message, but there's hundreds of them. Given the address of the user is known, wouldn't it be better to do the hard work to make it simple by adding a link to the appropriate council? Perhaps I'm being unfair, but to me this says to users, "we've done our bit, you're not our problem any more". User experience once the process is passed to a local government is varied. ...